Monthly Archives: October 2017

Early in my career, I had a whisper conversation with two of my novice colleagues. We had often heard several of our other colleague lament the fact that they had just picked up a set of essays and would have to spend several hours marking them. To them, it seemed drudgery, and they assumed all of us felt the same. In private, the two novice colleagues and I were a bit surprised and relieved to find that we actually enjoyed the process of marking our students essays and giving them feedback. We weren’t weird for feeling this way. Over 35 years later, I still find this a rewarding experience. One of the reasons is that it allows me an opportunity to experience flow.

A well-known research psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (he has humorously explained that his name is pronounced “chicks send me high”) has described this state as having several characteristics. Amazingly, in our job as ESL instructors, we often get to experience this.

Look at what happens when we are checking a set of essays and how that activity can lead to the euphoric experience of flow:

Research has found that students who multi-tasked with emails, text messages, and social media during class had lower scores on tests than students who did not multi-task.

I wanted to share that research with my Writing students, but, instead of just giving a lecture, I incorporated it in a fluency writing activity. (I’ve described the step in a fluency writing activity in a previous posting Fluency writing: reading, speaking in triads, and listening culminating in a writing task. ) It involves reading, speaking, listening and writing. In brief, students in groups of three, each having a different part of an article, read their part to their partners, and then, individually paraphrase the entire article.

I’m attaching the complete fluency activity about smartphones here in case you’d like to try it with your students. Fluency Smartphones

“Wow!” can be expected from professional writing not students’ writing.

An English Comp instructor told me that after reading a student’s essay, she wants to think, “Wow! These are amazing ideas.” I’ve also met ESL writing instructors who also looked at her students’ writing in a similar way. She wanted them to write about “something significant.” She wanted to be entertained. She wanted to learn something new.

Actually, those are not what we are trying to accomplish in our ESL writing courses. And even if they were the goals, how could they ever be honestly evaluated? I’ve witnessed a conversation between two instructors in which one of them was in total amazement about one of her student’s essays. In it, the student, who was African, described how happy the people in her village were and how people there did not experience depression even though they were some of the poorest people on earth. The other instructor yawned and said, “I already knew all that.”

After I read an essay, I might say, “Wow!” but it’s not because of the student’s profound ideas. It’s because s/he used a technique in a way that really help explain his/her idea.

What we’re looking for in essays is how well they are using writing techniques. These are tools that we can teach students, that they can apply to other writing tasks, and that we can evaluate.

Needless to say, we don’t just list the techniques and expect students to apply them. The art of teaching ESL is leading students to learning the techniques so they can have them available in their “tool box.”

Here a just a few of the writing techniques that we can teach our students: